Police — peacekeepers or law-enforcers?

The Howard
League has just published a new essay by renowned criminologist Professor
Robert Reiner questioning the role of the police as we know it. This is the
first in a new series of challenging
pamphlets entitled ‘What If…?’ in partnership with the Mannheim
Centre at the London School of Economics. Professor Reiner argues for a
rediscovery of the social role of policing, beyond crime control, and a frank
recognition that the police are primarily there as a first line response to
people in distress.

Reiner, who
sits on the Labour party’s justice policy working group, argues that “the most
important address for crime control is not Scotland Yard but 11 Downing Street”
as the police can only contribute to social pacification in conjunction with
broader policies spreading inclusive citizenship and social justice. He accuses the Labour government under
Blair of initiating an “arms race of ever tougher law and order”.

He suggests
that police performance should not be judged in terms of the overall crime
rate, on which they can have only a marginal impact. Nor should crime detection
be a crucial indicator of policing, as it is more a function of crime levels
than the quality of investigations.

This
exploration of the role of the police comes at an important time. The process
for electing Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) in England and Wales has just begun, so it has never been more important to define the role of the
police. Are they peacekeepers or
law enforcers?

The elected PCCs
are being introduced to give the public a say in policing in their area. The
PCCs will hold police forces and chief constables to account. They will set
local policing priorities and decide how council tax is spent on crime and
policing issues. The priority of crime control is built into the title itself,
as though the police’s impact on crime is a given. The government’s advocacy of PCCs is riddled with what
Reiner calls the “CSI fallacy”: that policing is a matter of uncomplicated
technical skill and efficiency.

Professor
Reiner argues that electing police commissioners does not guarantee
democratic policing, pointing out several possible dangers to bear in mind:

The first of these dangers, and its
potential impact on young people, has been of particular interest to the Howard
League. In a letter to peers
during the passage of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility bill, we
explicitly raised the issue that young people may be exploited by
electioneering police and crime commissioners.

PCCs keen to brandish increases in
arrest rates as proof of their effectiveness could easily base their campaigns
on an anti-young people agenda which sees them as little more than “low-hanging
fruit” who also happen to be unable or unlikely to vote. In part this populist danger is a
logical conclusion of introducing electoral politics into policing. But it also suggests that the political
consensus around policing as crime control is unlikely to be fundamentally
disturbed by the introduction of the PCCs.

Of course, crime fighting is the
dominant image of police in the media, which remains the main source of
information for the public. The
news media and police procedural dramas focus overwhelmingly on successful
police investigations of very serious violent crimes, especially murder,
although these form only a small part of the police workload. And the police
are spectacularly less successful in clearing up crimes than media stories suggest:
far fewer than 2 per cent of crimes result in a conviction.

In reality, the central police role
is to function as an emergency service against what Professor Reiner terms “a
sea of troubles”, where only a minority of calls to the police unequivocally
concern crimes. The political consensus that the police should be primarily
engaged in crime fighting overstates their ability to control crime, when the
drivers for disorder largely lie in deeper social causes. This creates
unrealistic expectations and diverts attention from the police’s more
fundamental peacekeeping role.

The government’s solution is to
advance the consensus view of policing even further than before. Criminal
catching will be paramount and the police need only be properly incentivised by
elected commissioners in order to deliver on crime reduction, despite the
threat of mounting economic and social collapse all around us.

Perhaps
there shall be some brave candidates in the PCC elections ready to challenge
the very consensus that is propelling them onto the electoral stage. But we shouldn’t hold our breath.

About the author

Anita
Dockley is research director of the Howard League for Penal Reform. She is
responsible for developing the charity’s research capacity, forging links with
academics and universities, funders and partner organisations. Her own research
interests include suicide and self-harm in prisons, women in prison and order
and control in the prison environment.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.
If you have any queries about republishing please contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.